12.18.12
IBD
Gun Laws: Before the tragedy in Connecticut, a shooter at an Oregon shopping mall was stopped by an armed citizen with a concealed carry permit who refused to be a victim, preventing another mass tragedy.
In the target-rich environment of the Clackamas Town Center two weeks before Christmas, the shooter managed to kill only two people before killing himself. A far worse tragedy was prevented when he was confronted by a hero named Nick Meli.
As the shooter was having difficulty with his weapon, Meli pulled his and took aim, reluctant to fire lest an innocent bystander be hit. But he didn't have to pull the trigger: The shooter fled when confronted, ending his own life before it could be done for him.
We will never know how many lives were saved by an armed citizen that day.
From Virginia Tech to a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., to a school in Newtown, Conn., such mass shootings are usually in venues declaring themselves gun-free zones.
Other mass shootings — from a high school shooting by in Pearl, Miss., to the New Life Church shooting in Colorado Springs, Colo., which took place before the massacre in Aurora — have been cut short when someone retrieved a gun from a car or elsewhere and confronted the shooter.
John Fund, writing in National Review, notes that the Aurora shooter had a choice of seven movie theaters within a 20-mile drive of his home that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. The Cinemark Theater he chose wasn't the closest, but it was the only one that banned customers from carrying their guns inside, otherwise allowed under Colorado law.
On April 16, 2007, there was no one able to shoot back when Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people to death on a Virginia Tech campus that, like the theater in Aurora, had declared itself gun-free. The state of Virginia is not a gun-free zone, and crime has dropped where guns are allowed.
Handgun purchases increased 112% between 2006 and 2011, and violent crimes committed by people using handguns fell by 22%. In 2006 there were 23,431 violent crimes in Virginia, and that dropped to 18,196 in 2011. As we and others have said, more guns in the hands of potential victims means less crime.
Had gun-controlled Norway let citizens carry concealed weapons, lone gunman Andres Brevik would not have been able to shoot 68 unarmed people after setting off a car bomb in the heart of Oslo that killed nine others.
At Sandy Hook, 27-year-old teacher Victoria Soto hid students in a bathroom or closet and died trying to protect them from shooter Adam Lanza. If she, the principal or any of the other adults in the school, had access to a firearm, things might have turned out differently.
President Obama, in the middle of genuinely moving remarks, managed to inject a subliminal need for gun control. We can expect to be lectured about gun rights and gun control by an administration that funneled the same type of weapons used at Sandy Hook to Mexican drug cartels in the Fast and Furious scandal.
As long as the president says we are not doing enough to protect our children and "these tragedies must end," how about a federally funded program to place armed security guards, perhaps retired cops, at each of the nation's schools? It is the disarming of potential victims that must end.
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